Trips, Flies and Fish: July 2019

After many years away from Tarpon Cay Lodge, I was excited to return, and tangle with the incredible volume of tarpon that live in the rivers and flats along the coast. I was pleased to find that little had changed with the lodge or with the fabulous baby tarpon fishery! Many kudos to Marco Ruz, our outfitter!

Runnning out to the local flats, minutes from the lodge, we discovered huge pods of tarpon, and although they were, initially, not interested in eating our flies, that would change by the end of the week!

Hi Flying Tarpon!

Everyone in our group was into fish, and although most had not fished for tarpon, they quickly adapted to the flies and technique, to be successful! We found fish just about everywhere we fished, and there was very little idle time on the deck!

Doug and a typical TCL tarpon!

Jeff with a nice "baby"!

Jay with his first tarpon! Man, can this guy cast!

Barry and a Nice Tarpon! His years of fly fishing and casting, paid off!

However, we encountered grass choking some of the more western creeks/flats, and this created a different situation for us. The tarpon were there, feeding under the grass mat, and we needed just the right fly to attack these fish.

Grass choked river!

Floating Minnow-BT

My new Floating Minnow-BT was the perfect fly for the grass mats! It is light, totally weedless, and a cast onto the grass could be stripped across the mat, and into an open hole, where the tarpon, were feeding! Wham!

Our guide thought it impossible to fish the grass mats, but the Floating Minnow-BT proved up to the challenge, and changed our approach. In one river, we noticed a tarpon feeding in a small opening, not larger than 3' wide, and my partner, Barry, dropped a cast beyond the opening, and stripped it to the hole....Wham! He did this 3 times, and the 4th time Barry was into a nice tarpon! It was a highlight for the trip!

I did the same thing a bit later, driving the fly into a "mangrove cave", beyond the grass, and caught another nice tarpon!

Mangrove Cave!

***

With great weather and calm seas, we motored up the coast to search for larger, migratory tarpon; and although the big tarpon eluded us, we did catch a number of tarpon around 25 lbs., searching around the fresh water cenotes!